


The Blue That Lasts

by guileheroine



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, F/F, Fairy Tale Elements, Fantasy, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Interspecies Romance, Magic, Mild Gore, Spirits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2019-08-08 23:22:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16438781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guileheroine/pseuds/guileheroine
Summary: When Asami goes seeking answers to the blights plaguing her town, a mysterious near death experience leads her to a fascinating new friendship that can turn more than their fortunes.Mermaid AU! (fishy Korra/human Asami)





	1. The Blue That Lasts

**Author's Note:**

> my take on the old favourite - more in the realm of fairy tale than the canon world but hopefully true to its essence nonetheless. be warned for a bit of mild body horror if that's something you're sensitive to. enjoy to some ambient ocean sounds!! Also on tumblr @guileheroine
> 
> this story is a oneshot. the following chapter has some additional ficlets written for korrasami month 2019 that take place in the same universe.

 

 

 

> _Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths,_
> 
> _breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,_
> 
> _The change thence to the sight here,_
> 
> _and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere,_
> 
> _The change onward from ours_
> 
> _to that of beings who walk other spheres._

 

Walt Whitman, ‘The World below the Brine’

 

 

The boat!

 

The cutter that had been Asami’s favourite private project, no matter how keen she was take it out on the water again, was _not_ the choice for this voyage.

 

That is her final thought to fully form, that she won’t know now if her adjustments worked, and they’ll never work again, and in any case _she’ll_ never know if they do, if her plucky Tsukikage makes it back ashore, she sure as hell won’t -

 

Asami gasps, desperate gulps of air full of rain that chokes her; she pushes hard, but her spine is a block of sharp ice and the rest of her numb, except where the frigid water spreads like stinging poison in her mouth and throat. She kicks against pure weight, against nothing, against the will of the world -

 

The bitter wind strips her thought. Lightning blinds her. Water boxes her ears in and the thunder splits their drums, all in an expertly coordinated assault, the sea merciless.

 

-

 

Darkness.

 

The ocean, though faraway, is still in her ears. For a moment she listens to it and lets it calm her bodiless mind. Still, save the sway of the sound.

 

It’s peaceful all the same, wherever she may be: blackout, afterlife, waking death.

 

No.

 

_Waking -_

 

Air, whipping her skin raw. A searing pain somewhere below. Something wrenches her back into her battered body, reawakens it and with it its torture. Asami’s breaths are barely existent, then her breaths are laboured. The pain flares with its full body this time and she wants to cry out. It pierces like a hundred daggers, stabs wounds made close, and now she _wishes_ she were asleep or dead, but it keeps waking with her.

 

Something down there wants to pull her back to her death. She has no imagination left to draw the creature up, and maybe it’s only the possessive lash of the ocean again - but she notices it too late, only by the drag of her body on the sand (Where are her legs?) There’s only her excruciating wound, both exact and placeless, so pervasive it may as well be her whole being.

 

And something is pulling her to the water.

 

When she inhales to resist, she exhales water. She shudders and coughs and it trickles from her mouth and her nose, sears a blistering fire back into her chest until it trickles from her eyes. The teeth she means to grit only chatter. Asami forces her eyes open and white light shoves her vision back, but not before it registers the chilling shapes - the slap of a heavy slick form on the water - and her leg.

 

All above the knee her flesh is split wide like fallen fruit; bruised, overripe, festering. Blood and grit cake the wound under the laceration, skin flapping in the breeze - an ugly red eye staring and blinking, looking on her - not part of her.

 

It can’t be part of her. She heaves.

 

 _No!_ Cries everything but her voice. She would be far away if not for the blinding pain and the strange grip on her barely sensate skin. These two forces are inching her towards death, and even if she could, she is frightened to look.

 

Suddenly her lungs have found it in them to fight back: Asami coughs and wheezes, a violent, uncontrolled thrash. Her throat is tender and tight from the salt and water and air but her desperate lungs don’t care. _No,_  she gasps soundlessly, regaining her mind for a brief second, trying to lift up on her elbows. Her arms are a strange and cold weight, limp in the ashy sand. Unmoving - she’s at the mercy of the creature about to bring her back to the mercy of the sea.

 

She heaves a cough that wracks her whole body, and the injury sends another ripple of fire through her. For all the dizzying pain, it manages to free her voice.

 

“No!” One last push, even as her vision blurs, to look down at the foreign state of her body. But it’s not for Asami’s frail effort that she fails. When she bears up, a weight - that unmistakable, living weight - bears back, holding her numb legs.

 

It stuns her into consciousness, one final time. And when the weight lifts, it doesn’t return to pulling her.

 

Asami’s mind slips. Whatever it is - her fate is its now.

 

She flops like a doll, breathless, and the fading shivers of energy come all the way back to her head, and she wants to focus these final moments on clearing this mystery. But in stillness, the pain below floats into perfect, excruciating focus - until she is nothing but it. She loses her grasp on her surroundings, though not before she feels - a hand? A shift in the sand beside her.

 

She manages to clamp her teeth, and her tears roll and roll a silent stream. Her _leg!_ The tracks sting in the salty air, and for all that her body is ashore, Asami is drowning… Back to the sea, which the pain turns from water to fire...  

 

Right on the precipice, Asami is pulled back.

 

Cool water on her cheeks, cool fingers.

 

She opens her eyes. The fingers jump back.

 

She forgets the fingers.

 

Asami blinks to clear her vision, the fresh tears trickling with each pulse of her thigh. She looks up into a face, with wide eyes and clumped wet lashes and - and strange marks, strange planes, that won’t come into focus, that may just be spots of her own delirium. More tears replenish the course off her cheek when she blinks in surprise, but they are forgotten. Her shallow, ragged breaths, heartbeat running (erratically, ever farther from her) continue urgently as she gazes. Her leg burns.

 

The girl stares back. Her hair is dry, and the specks of sand on her deep skin are crisp enough to fly off in the light breeze, the innocent remnant of the storm.

 

Asami bites her cheek against the pain. Her heartbeat has run far, almost out of earshot. Her head blurs. Tears roll. The fingers brush them away.

 

Asami wants to plead, to this her last apparent hope. Her fumbling mind wrests from the face a semblance of determination as foreign to Asami now as that sight of her body; strange enough to blur the edge of the pain with curiosity, until she realises it’s not the pain she’s losing but - herself, everything.

 

She hears the girl take a stricken breath, as though Asami had suddenly imparted the pain straight into her.

 

She thinks she hears her say, “Your leg is hurt - really bad. I can help you, but not here. Hey.” Cool fingers brush her forehead, not a bad final sensation. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

 

-

 

Asami rises at dawn as usual, but the winter has pushed dawn back. The worst storm of the season has wrecked the port and all the ships in harbour and at sea. The town is quiet in its aftermath, no signs of the usual traffic and commerce - only the chilling curlew cries. She goes out to survey the damage. The docklands are in disarray; the sailors, tradesmen, hunters, mechanics, servants, dogs heaping their scraps together. It stays dark and she looks skyward to no signs. The alleys of the crowded enclaves of the brokers from the Fire territories, the transient Air pilgrims, the inland traders from the desert, are abandoned. She weaves through the wreckage and finds every devastation eerie. In the safe high houses on the seafront like hers, a merchant opens his windows and whatever he discerns on the black horizon makes him scream. The dawn doesn’t come, but an angry light rises from ocean and makes all the sky too bright. Thunder rumbles from the source of the light. Then snarling shadows with licks of harsh light for eyes leap over the leagues of ocean, over the docks and crash on them like waves of pitch and tar, and they have to drown or run.

 

She wakes up from the usual dream to a far stranger one.

 

Water as weightless as air. Water as _breathable_ as air. Asami sits up in the bed of soft down billowed with water, in the dark but hollow, airy (no… watery) chamber - filled with _water_ , and tests her senses. A few discreet bubbles bob away when she exhales her breath of fresh water. She wiggles, blinks with no sting as her eyes make space for hints and waves of weak light in this dim underwater room.

 

Barely any buoyancy. No pressure on her chest, little resistance when she pulls her hand through the - water. Every law of physics breaks before her eyes. She clears her throat and the liquid doesn’t clog it.

 

Asami frowns, clenching her hand in the silky fur blanket draped over her form. Her eyes swivel around. There is - furniture? - hewn straight from stone, a rug of strange spongy fronds… She stares across to a doorway, with real light beyond, before which a scallop shell curtain clicks pleasantly together. Unnerved, she sits up, clutching the blanket to her chest.

 

The curtain is swept aside with a sound like a gentle sheet of hail.

 

When Asami sees her face, she knows she is awake; and though it’s no clearer, the world shifts around her, from the focal point of this one familiar image that hooks her brain and pulls it back to the scene of her last conscious moment.

 

When she sees her _tail,_ the sheer blankness from that moment to this begins to make a strange kind of sense.

 

“Oh! I’m sorry!” The girl, she looks - mortified, even in the bad light, where her face is not much more than a shadow to Asami’s eyes. Her voice is deep and clear and young, and her - _tail,_ it swishes in agitation, and Asami has to look away, heart stuttering in her chest.

 

A gravely animated sigh. She’s talking to herself. “I _know_ \- the others told me what to do, I just -”

 

Asami’s mind swims, back to her passionate eyes on the strand. She wonders if the girl simply feels all things so honest and large, and the memory is less painful for the thought.

 

The girl cuts off, scans around swiftly and snatches a wisp of fabric from a corner of the chamber too dark to see, bringing it to Asami. “Your blouse was torn.”

 

Asami notices her gaze, on the blanket held possessively to Asami’s chest. She understands, she thinks, and replies in a quiet ring she’s surprised to hear not echo - to _hear_ at all. “Oh. Thank you.”

 

“My tribeswomen,” says her mermaid, worrying her fist on her chin, “they told me human women like to cover up, I really didn’t mean to embarrass you.” She gestures vaguely, coming to rest on the sloping mass of silks and cushions that form the bed. “Your blouse tore so I stitched that together from a sheet.”

 

Asami notices the girl’s own garb: none, that is, except a plain strip of deep fabric digging under her ribs, the outline of a halter around her neck - similarly, hurriedly makeshift, as far as she can tell in the dark. Nonetheless adequately flattering on... the half of this girl Asami can be a discerning judge of.

 

“I don’t mind, really,” Asami assures her, feeling hypocritical when she shuffles under the blanket to change. The mundane course of conversation is weirdly maddening, she struggles to hold her world together. “Could I - could I have a moment?”

 

“Sure.” Her mermaid rests her elbows on a silvery cushion, expectant. Asami can sense the girl’s eager energy vibrating the dark; the discipline it takes for her to go at Asami’s present delicate pace. She twists some kind of brace or band on her arm as she waits. Her tail flits in short waves and Asami has the impression of a foot tapping.

 

Her tail. It’s longer than a pair of legs and more flexible, glittering when the faint light hits it, but she can’t discern much more. Absently, it flicks up on to Asami’s blanketed legs, and from watching it transfixed she suddenly, instinctively flinches.

 

“Are you in pain?” Brows come together faster than magnets at the possibility.

 

“No -” _no, your tail weirded me out,_ Asami doesn’t say - and she realises, wait, how weird: she is in _no_ pain. She sighs slowly, an extension of this deepening sense of frustration and intrigue, a lone bubble of air floating away.

 

“You healed me.”

 

The girl is silent for a long moment, but her fingers disrupt the water in a quickly aborted movement, like she had wanted to reach them out to Asami. Vaguely, Asami wonders if they have… webs.

 

“Look, you can’t stay here too long. Let me take you to the beach. I’ll explain everything.”

 

-

 

“What’s your name?” Asami gasps when her head breaks the water, having held the question in her mind for several minutes. She had been grabbed around the waist (through the floaty scraps that remained of her pants, she could feel cool, slimy scales against her) and propelled up, and she clung to the late thought like an anchor while the water whooshed past and consumed her senses.

 

When she breathes air she almost loses her grip on the question, the water sloshing at her neck as unfamiliar and capricious as ever again. Before she answers her, her mermaid muscles her up onto an outcrop of rock. Asami helps herself up on it and finds her balance, grateful.

 

“What’s your name?” She breathes again, squeezing saltwater from her eyes to look down at the face now propped comfortably on the rock beside her. Of course she must have a name? Merpeople have _names._

 

The girl raises her eyebrows. “I thought you’d never ask,” she says, and her tone wounds Asami, until she giggles up at her and pats her arm gently. “You’re _frazzled_. My name is Korra.”

 

Asami returns the laugh, relieved. “Korra. I’m sorry, Korra.” She introduces herself in like, just her first name, which is intimate and unusual for her. Korra rolls it around in her mouth; Asami, breathing inconspicuously at last, takes her in.

 

There _are_ markings around her eyes - delicate curlicues in a pearly white - and when she cocks her head at Asami the skin of her cheek shimmers with the hue and light of aquamarine in the sun. Her wet hair shines in a pile on her shoulder. When she crosses her arms, the wisps of translucent blue at her elbow skim the water.

 

“Are you…” Korra tips her head further to the side. “Done staring?”

 

“I -” Asami crosses her own arms and licks her dry lips. She says, “What happened to me?” - the same moment that Korra demands, “So what were you doing out here?”

 

Well, it seems inconsequential now: a lifetime ago, what with her life practically lost and found again.

 

With her world stretched further, into fantastical terrain, by this girl’s heroic entrance.

 

Asami breathes hard and blows out through her mouth.

 

“Are you _really_ alright? Please don’t pass out again!”

 

Asami shakes her head, willing herself to settle. “I came to look for… I don’t know. Help.” She coughs awkwardly. “Your people, maybe,” she improvises, a suggestion brought by hindsight. “I live in the town on Yue Bay - do you know it?” She lifts a loose hand instinctively northward, but she has no idea if it is the direction of home.

 

“Well, the storms have been really bad this year and, we thought we should come and look for… People have been disappearing, out at sea - losing cargo...”

 

Korra pulls forward in curiosity, anticipation. Asami’s at no less of a loss for this unassuming encouragement. And every glance at her is a distraction, a repeating calibration of her world around this new existence - around _merpeople,_ around _her_ \- that leaves this alien girl in focus and the edges blurry, reshaping again.

 

“There are rumours -” Asami pecks her nail against a speckled stone and watches it bend, intrigued by her own faint embarrassment. “Well, some of our elders say that when the storms come _this_ harsh - it means that the spirits are angry.”

 

Korra blinks, engrossed. But the pull of her mouth betrays her skepticism. “What do you know about them?”

 

Asami is doubting everything she does know. “They say -” She keeps shying behind the phrase, raising it like a tentative shield between herself and the uncertainty of her knowledge - “In our stories, the space between the worlds is thinnest here, in the ocean. And they believe there are creatures - who still commune with the spirits. A lot of us - a lot of humans don’t believe in… don’t believe that anymore, but we follow the wisdom of our elders, in times like these.” She looks for Korra’s eyes.

 

Korra’s lips purse. She sinks back in the water a little as she processes Asami’s explanation. Asami brings her hands up around her arms, beading with goosebumps. When Korra speaks, it’s not the words that she expects, not that she _has_ expectations.

 

Korra lifts her hand, disturbing the water. “Are you cold?” She says gently.

 

“What?” Asami says. She notices her notice the fabric dark with wet sticking on her skin. Korra draws the ocean up like a rippling scarf, and before she knows it, it surrounds her - water warmer than the springs in the Fire Lakes. Asami releases the gasp of preemptive shock that had hunched her shoulders, in a wondrous breath instead.

 

Korra flashes a satisfied grin, but she sobers again immediately.

 

“Look, you weren’t going to last when I found you, you were frozen. I couldn’t see a vessel. I thought you were dead until…” Her lip juts up, brow creased. “I brought you back in so I could warm you up.” She curls her fingers inwards to her palms and the water swirls heat through Asami like a caress. Though the image of her near death steams behind her eyelids it doesn’t touch Asami.

 

“I wasn’t sure if I could save your leg, but I _really_ tried. The water healed you.”

 

 _She_ had healed her. Asami opens her eyes and blinks down.

 

And now Asami is about to ask for more - for help that this girl _isn’t_ jumping to give; is not able to, perhaps.

 

Asami clasps the curled fingers in her own. Her shroud of water falters for a second when she grabs Korra’s hand, before resuming its shape. “Thank you,” she blurts, thicker than she had intended. “For saving me.” Asami sniffs, wiping her face with the back of her hand awkwardly.

 

The water sneaks soundlessly up, a thin layer up her neck to her cheeks, washing the source of her slight embarrassment away. They both giggle: Asami sheepish, and Korra - _enchanted_ with her sudden gratitude. When she laughs the water temperature actually rises, Asami notes with awe.

 

She has no boat, and many more questions than she had unceremoniously arrived with. A hundred more fall into her  head every time she notices her curious saviour, and the existence of her _existence_ trammels her brain again. The midday sun glows on her skin and picks out the shoreline beyond them.

 

Asami shields her eyes and gazes to it. Sunbeam Cove, facing east from the mainland, not half an hour from the edge of the harbour.

 

“Will you take me to the beach? I recognise this place, actually. I can make it from there.”   

 

Once the water splashes back ( _all_ the water, leaving Asami inexplicably dry) Korra twists a wet lock of hair between her fingers. “Of course! But one condition.”

 

Asami gives her an inquisitive frown.

 

“Come back soon,” Korra says, nodding her on. “I might be able to help you.”

 

Asami thanks her again on the beach, relishing the sand beneath her feet, packing it under her toes. She watches Korra play with the water as she leaves; a frolicking figure receding into the horizon. She dives and the full form of her serpentine tail curves up from the water like a ray. Iridescent colours - the blues and sudden silvers of sea and sky, layered ice - glimmer from the scales before the tail flares into a twin fin of liquid moonstone, as shapely as the petals etched lovingly in the woodwork on the hull of Asami’s lost Tsukikage.

 

-

 

It’s hard to explain away the loss of the cutter.

 

She apologised dutifully to her father, racking the guilt and anguish up (and secretly, the anger, because the loss was _hers_ , it was her favourite boat); she chided her workmates for mourning that rather than celebrating her miraculous unscathed escape, eyes twinkling. And when all that could be was as before, she had gone to the library and pored over every book on mystic portents and spirits and creatures and the like. On merfolk (which was the preferred designation of the so-called scientists of such phenomena). Who were _real._

 

And she allows a hint of smugness to creep into her belly, thinking of her father’s flippant dismissal of the spiritual leaders at the council meeting last week. Then she clears it out in shame when she hears the news of another patrol boat beyond the bay capsizing in windless waters, taking with it a man and a woman she saw almost weekly when they came in for supplies.

 

The site of her injury bears no blemish save the ghostly trace of a few faded stretch marks it already had. All that remains is a lingering tingle across her thigh that she has to wait out before climbing out of bed in the few mornings since her return. The absence of even a bruise _feels_ wrong, not on her mind but on her body, like a phantom wound.

 

Asami holds up the least unwieldy of her new texts on the supernatural, hooking her elbows over the edge of the tub so it doesn’t slip in the water. She runs her bath hot, pushing her foot against the spout so it will glimmer rather than pour, hoping it will ease more of the residual tension and fatigue of her body.

 

-

 

After a couple of days’ rest Asami returns to the cove, and only on the edge of the water does it occur that she has no way to contact her new piscine friend.

 

She crosses her legs and sits on the strand, chin in hand. She inhales the salty air, it triggers her tongue and she licks her lips. A dull hunk of driftwood lays lodged in the bank near her and she leans aside to snap off a twig. Asami draws in the sand, the stick parting the grains like tracks in a road.

 

“ _Asami!_ ”

 

Oh, so she hadn’t dreamt it all.

 

She scans around for the source of the cry, and Korra is there on the same outcrop, an islet exposed by the tide, that she had manhandled Asami onto. She leaps off and swims ashore, Asami digging her knuckles into the sand in an unsure kind of anticipation as she waits for her approach.

 

“I knew you’d be here!” Korra shakes her wet hair and flecks of water fly everywhere.

 

Is that an expression of greeting or did she - did she _know?_

 

Korra rolls onto her back and digs her shoulder into the sand. When she looks at Asami, it’s up from the ground, the tracks of Asami’s drawings muddied by her sprawling hair. Korra closes her eyes and hums in the bath of strong, blinding rays. Her lids are quite thin, smudged with the same pearlescent sheen as the planes of her sunlit skin, giving the appearance of translucence. A face so fey - until she tenses suddenly and rolls one eye up to Asami; and it becomes sweet, familiar - well, human.

 

“How’s your leg?”

 

Asami stumbles on the question. “Actually... _perfect_.” It hadn’t even crossed her mind today.

 

She tells her about her reading. According to some legendary records - or plain myths, she couldn’t decide, she admitted (though not without a tinge of regret and awkwardness, speaking as she was to a _mermaid_ ) - undersea creatures had long been the intermediaries between the human and spirit worlds. By virtue of their greater intelligence, merfolk were privy to the strongest connection.

 

According to Korra, who dismisses Asami’s uncertainty with plain knowledge, it’s impossible to _know_ if they were. “The spirit world - it’s been closed off for a long time.” She frowns, stretching and scratching her upper arm where her  silver brace glints against the cords of muscle. “What you heard, maybe it’s not wrong, but honestly, it’s as much as I know, too. I’m trying to find out if we can get through though.”

 

“Get through?” Asami pulls her knees up, intent.

 

Korra flips onto her front. “You’re right. We _did_ have contact with the spirits, back when there was movement between the worlds. Now it’s like -” She gestures widely, cutting an invisible cord with her fingers, little scales materialising on her skin only as reflections. “But… I think it means that if anyone _can_ commune with the spirits, we can.” She gives her a stern nod that says _I’ll work on it._

 

“It wouldn’t surprise me, if they are angry,” Asami says, sounding more cryptic than she wants to. But she struggles to explain herself to someone who hasn’t lived through the change. “Our town is booming. There’s double the people there were five years ago - mostly hunters and merchants - but half the _product._ It’s disappearing, they have to know it. The folks inland can’t get enough of their pearls and herring and sealskin, a no one _here_ can get enough of their money.”

 

Korra looks like she’s been delivered a plate of food for thought. Then her face relaxes, dropping into her propped hands. She gazes up at Asami. “Thank you for coming back.”

 

Asami can’t help her smile. “Have you… Am I the first human you’ve met?”

 

Korra nods vigorously. “Well, talked to, yes. They wash up sometimes but…you know.” She shrugs, pulling her dark hair over one side. There’s a smattering of scales on her bared shoulder that match her tail and Asami wonders if they’re cold to the touch, too. “Most of the time, the water kills them before we can get to them.”

 

She exhales - a sound that feels like a long-held question. “So my mother said… humans were ugly. Plain.”

 

Asami is momentarily stunned. She opens and closes her mouth. “Well, they’re diverse,” she mumbles eventually, avoiding her gaze, and is duly ignored.

 

“But you’re _so_ beautiful.”

 

Her knees slip from her grasp. She stifles her laugh with her hand, vaguely relieved, and shakes her head. “ _Oh_. Thank you. So are you!”

 

In the frame of her palms, Korra grins, all her face alight with the sun and the words. Asami doesn’t have to think to produce a sentiment in kind. “You, too. I - I really like your tail. Really,” she finds herself imploring.

 

Otherworldly, perhaps, but that was also a word for beautiful.

 

-

 

She gives Asami a large cowrie shell, the teeth dipped in faintest silver. As soon as she cups it in her hands, Asami knows it’s not nature-made. Smooth to the touch, her fingers slide and tap searchingly - some kind of essence permeates the glassy substance. Mermaid magic, Korra confirms.

 

“You can use this to call me. I’ll find you.” She curves a palm over it where it lies in Asami’s outstretched hands.

 

Before sunset on her next free evening, Asami runs to the beach to test it. Folded in one sweaty palm, it feels as useless as any of the other sea shells scattered, some crushed and fragmented, about her feet. She knocks on it, flicks it, passes it between her hands. It’s low tide and she ambles to the meek lip of the waves, adds a loud sigh of her own to the wind’s whistles.

 

There’s an almighty splash way out on the water; and once Asami comes down from the startle, her skirt is sprayed.

 

“ _Sorry!_ ”

 

-

 

She’s sitting with her tail spooled into a regal swirl, head resting forward on it, eyes closed. Asami wonders when and then if mermaids sleep - one of the many questions that thronged to overwhelm her at their first meeting, and one she’s now surprised not to have learnt the answer to in the intervening few weeks.

 

“I meditated,” Korra tells her. She uses her fingers to scoops some flesh from a large shell and chews it pensively.

 

Asami’s sun-heavy eyes fly open, out from her reverie. “You...?”

 

“I don’t think it _worked_ .” She deflates, an odd picture against the majestic sunset, and Asami does too, although she has yet figure out the full meaning of Korra’s announcement. Asami declines her offer of some raw flesh from the magnificent shell in her hand. She had shocked Korra earlier when she revealed that they _dried_ the abalone they gathered before shipping it off.

 

At her sides, Korra’s gossamer fins scull the milky water in a slow rhythm like two oars of silk. She’s deep in thought. “I think it’s the only way though, and I know I felt - something. I talked to my father, and his counselors. They said I should keep going. He was… happy I was trying.” At Asami’s continued stare she adds, “To establish contact. With the spirits.” Suddenly she lifts and stretches: where the smooth skin of her stomach pebbles into scales the muscles tighten, rippling all as one.

 

“Our magic, it only works in this world. I’m not sure how I can use it to get across.” Korra makes a fist caught between frustration and determination. Her bracelet of raw silver and sea glass jangles. “But it’s _real_ magic. Which means, I think, that it didn’t _come_ from this world.”

 

“That’s what our shamans do,” Asami says suddenly. “Meditate, I mean. But they say they lost contact with the spirits a long time ago, and nowadays few people believe they ever had it. Some people don’t even think there _is_ a Spirit World. And they _don’t_ believe in magic.”

 

“Do you?”

 

Asami bows her head. She turns the pebbles in her hand over, some as clear as the glass. “I... _didn’t_ ,” she says slowly. Somehow it feels like a slight, and she reaches out for Korra’s hand, cupping hers over the closed knuckles. “But I trust my own senses first, and they aren’t deceiving me.”

 

“Woman of science,” Korra says, a phrase Asami’s proud to hear her parrot. Korra snorts and smiles and the apple of her cheek traps the fleeing sun like an opal.

 

-

 

The curious observations come and come, and Asami finds that the helplessness subsides ever more into eager explanations, into laughter, into unabashed intrigue. Korra tries to take all her questions in stride.

 

“ _Don’t_ tell me you can’t sing.” Asami sits on the end of the pier, the feet of her crossed legs sticking over the edge, having summoned Korra here where the water is much calmer on a windy evening like this, no matter how sheltered their usual cove may be. A marshy, forested spit extends parallel to the pier like a grizzled arm, making this secluded section of the beach even more private, shrouded in an air of dense and peaceful solitude.

 

Korra spreads her fingers over the green water on either side and tilts her head cutely, lost and reluctant to show it. The circlet of dense pearls and shells and narwhal ivory on her head becomes lopsided - the chief’s daughter, she came straight from some important assembly tonight. “Why…?”

 

“Oh, you _can’t_!”

 

Korra scoffs and lifts a fat bubble of water with a sweep of her hand, aiming it at Asami. “No, tell me why.”

 

Asami presses down on her hands in her laughter. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.” Her hair unhooks from her ear when she leans over and it falls in a curtain, the ends almost skimming the water. Korra changes tack pragmatically, tugging on them to pull her forward, and Asami squeals for her balance.

 

“Seriously, seriously, it’s what mermaids are supposed to do! So the stories go… They enchant sailors with their voices and drag us down to our deaths.”

 

Korra raises an indignant eyebrow and crosses her arms. “That’s stupid. You’re only alive because I dragged you down.”

 

Unrelenting, Asami clicks her tongue. Her own mood surprises her. “Well, answer the question, Korra.”

 

Korra swishes onto her back and lifts her tail. Horizontal just below the murky water, the distorted colours glimmer like a slinking snake. “Well, I _can_ sing. But I’m not gonna do it until you give me some of your leaf water.”

 

The tea - Asami had forgotten. She brought it for Korra to taste. She rummages in her bag for the flask and two cups. The light and fruity plum flavour steams in the cold air immediately. Korra pushes her elbows up onto the planks of the pier, splaying them so they kiss Asami’s knees, the cup wrapped in her hands at the centre.

 

“Mm,” Korra says, curling her tail up as she drinks the comforting brew. Asami can swear it gives her a dim glow.

 

After a while it becomes too cold for Asami to linger, but Korra insists on a song, never one to leave herself unproven. She takes her circlet off and tosses it onto her curved tail like a ring for safekeeping; floats lax on her back, utterly at ease, hair floating like a slick of brilliant oil where it breaks the surface tension. Her voice is liquid moonlight, at once deep and silvery. At the sound Asami wishes that she could go and lie by her, and let it lull her to sleep right there in the water.

 

-

 

Spring is well on its way. The sun boils between Asami’s temples while she fights with the corroded, misshapen cylinders of the bowsprit of an ancient cargo ship in port. The tang of the wrench between her teeth makes her mouth waste water; and she can’t help but wonder why this old thing - with so many pockmarks that a good six or seven of them are slaving around its nooks today - is still afloat when one of the mayor’s shiniest vessels vanished out of the blue yesterday.

 

She leaves her post not long after lunch, queasy from the heat.

 

Maybe she had gotten ahead of herself when she found not even a scar in place of a frightful wound. The truth is her body isn’t the same - still strong, but more liable to wavering, as though it isn’t quite used to its new shape, its composition, identical though it might look to before. She has to give it it time. It had been quite a trauma, after all - the shock of both injury and repair. It’s a small wonder she’s unsteadier on her feet, even though her leg awakens reliably every morning following a few minutes’ wait.

 

Cold baths help her limbs seize into attention. With her nostrils and just the tips of her lashes above the bathwater, Asami focuses. What had it felt like?

 

How had she, with her nose, her human lungs, breathed underwater? It had seemed as right as air.

 

She dips further, leveraging with her feet against the cold tiles. The water in her nose stings. She instinctively screws her face against it, until there’s nothing to do but sit up and splutter - but as she does she finds the breath she is desperate for has already been taken. The runnels of water come from her nose and mouth unhindered when she exhales.

 

-

 

“Special? Not really,” Korra is saying, spraying water into intricate, animated shapes, making a silent puppet show with the loosest flick of her fingers. A baby turtle crawls against the invisible tide before being swept into an undertow, its watery head curling into the lip of a wave. “I told you, most of us can control it.” She channels the liquid into a spout and sticks her tongue out to lap it up.

 

“But you warm the water, too. And the healing?”

 

“You could say I’m talented.” She winks and giggles low.

 

Asami turns away, smiling hard. “There you go, then.”

 

“I’m powerful, actually,” Korra continues matter-of-factly, but there’s a nervous edge to her voice now that Asami has a feeling she doesn’t notice, and her fins stop swaying in the seawater. “I probably - I don’t think I should have been able to heal something like your leg.”

 

With the advantage of hindsight, Asami recalls that there had been an air of wariness about Korra that first day. She couldn’t have known it to be uncharacteristic then, but it’s clearer now: how she had wrung her hands and pulled her up to explain that she _tried_ to heal her, when it seemed perfectly clear that she had succeeded.

 

Asami doesn’t want to jinx it. She lets the comment go, not that she would have known what to say.

 

When it’s her turn to demonstrate a human quirk, she takes pride and endless joy in Korra’s fascination.

 

Korra’s mouth twists when Asami slides off her boots to wet her feet. “Look, I didn’t want to bring it up when we met, but you kind of weirded me out…”

 

Of course it’s the legs.

 

Asami sticks one out for her. To her surprise Korra takes it and hooks the ankle over her shoulder, examining the musculature with a hand wrapped around the calf. “They still feel strong,” she concedes, and glances up into a memory. “Stronger than after I fixed them, that’s a good sign. That was difficult, I’m glad I didn’t mess up.” Her brow remains puckered, distant from the words. Asami dips her head solemnly - she can’t imagine a medic at home operating on a tail.

 

Korra leans her cheek into the ankle to keep it in place and tests the bend of her knee, where the had injury begun, with feather touches as light as cool water. Asami’s eyes fall shut and snap open, and she squirms to adjust her dress.

 

“But how do you… you know, swim?”

 

Asami laughs aloud. Korra, affronted, smacks her leg. “You don’t see me _walking,_  so it’s a fair question!”

 

Asami explains that you float and kick, and it’s similar enough that Korra can’t protest.

 

“I just can’t believe there’s two of them,” Korra confesses, dazy with disbelief. “And so smooth!”

 

A burning question for later, perhaps never, enters Asami’s mind unbidden. “Oh,” she interjects, folding her legs back. “No, they have hair.” Korra’s eyes goggle. “Some people just take it off. Look, just think of them like another pair of arms.”

 

“Can you hold with your toes?”

 

Asami giggles incredulously. “Can I -?”

 

“You know, like I can do this.” With the end of her tail, Korra spades a nautilus shell from the shallows onto her fin and deposits it next to Asami.

 

“ _No._  They’re not so versatile. They like solid ground.”

 

-

 

At the cove, at the pier, once before dawn on the docks, too, for a secret and instructive tour of all the strange accidents Asami has noted: wherever the land and sea meet in a friendly way, so do they. Asami comes to her for reprieve, of sorts, and Korra is a captivating audience as much as a captive one, all her enchantment enchanting: eyes that bulge beautifully, shoulders that lift a mosaic of glittery sand when she sits up in intrigue, hair that whips the wind back when she plays in the water. Never altogether still, even if it’s just a loose old scale fluttering in the breeze before she picks it off with a wince and threatens to scrape Asami with it.

 

-

 

“I found something,” Korra says one day, bobbing like a cork in the gentle current before Asami has had a chance to find herself a spot.

 

She kneels at the very edge of the shore instead, eager for Korra’s discovery. “What?”

 

“The spirits,” Korra says, reaching for Asami’s hands, drying hers thoughtfully and almost unconsciously on the way, the water stripping down from her fingers as they dive upward. “I think I can find out how they got here - how they used to come to our world.”

 

Her words invite the immediate image of Asami’s dream. Korra brings her back with another tug on her hand.

 

“That dream you told me about - it reminded me of something I’ve heard, too. There weren’t any maps to the Spirit World, no _route_ between the worlds. There was a _gateway_ \- undersea, of course, where the gap is thinnest.”

 

“Like a portal?” Asami sits comfortably, gathering her skirt into the dip of her lap, heedless of the wet seeping up the hems. Korra will dry her out later, anyway.

 

“Exactly!” A little splish in the water behind her punctuates the answer, the only evidence above the surface of an excited flip of the tail.

 

“But how do you know?” Asami says.

 

Korra’s hands retract, disappearing under the surface, close to her sides now. “I… I’m not completely sure.” She licks her lips like she’s testing her answer. “I searched for anything the families in our tribe might have tucked away in the troves - heirlooms, scraps of whatever… There’s so much, Asami, _stacks_ of it. Anyway -” She straightens again. “There was a map - well, not a map, right,  but a chart, of the magnetic forces on the seafloor. Our elders said they didn’t remember how to read it but I - I just _knew._  Like I could feel out the lines. They came alive for me.”

 

 _Wow_. Asami transmits it soundlessly with her eyebrows and a slight slump further down the slope of the beach.  

 

A moment passes where all she notices is the way the water oscillates before Korra’s chest from her deep, elevated breaths; and the warm and briny smell of her carried from a few feet away.

 

“You are powerful,” Asami says, clicking her tongue.

 

-

 

“And you _are_ like… a princess, no? Does it... change anything?”

 

Korra laughs, bestowing her with a smile down from her vantage point on the rock. Asami leans up against its gnarled side, resting her face against her folded arms. The setting sun makes her squint until Korra tilts her head to block it.

 

“I guess so. Why?” Tonight Korra has her hair pushed and knotted up with some kind of woven reed, tiny little sea stars sewn in the plaits. It keeps it out of the way as she works a slimy clump of kelp all over her skin.

 

Asami shrugs. “All this spirit stuff. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence to me. You’re like - a pioneer.” For all her playfulness, there is a gravity about Korra, a heavy curious fire, that doesn’t quite befit Asami’s idea of a mermaid life frolicking in the sea. Not your average mermaid, that is. She seeks more - pulls the weight of responsibility onto her back the heavier it bears, just to be able to conquer it.

 

“You might be right. Our tribes, they’re getting excited too. I held a meeting. The wisewomen say they haven’t seen magic like mine in generations.” Korra huffs, a tension fighting itself in her brow, like a drawstring.

 

No surprise: she is all magic.The twilight is long today, like the sun doesn’t want to leave her face. Asami is glad for its loitering.

 

“But you’re proud of that,” Asami says, though she understands perfectly well.

 

“I am! I guess I’m... figuring it out.” Her shoulders rise with feeling before drooping again. “What about you? Do you ever get tired of your work?”

 

“Mm... not the work,” Asami says, rubbing her nose. “Not the building. I am tired of working for my father, though.” She makes a dismissive sound in her throat. “All these businesses coming in - there’s money in shipping, more the faster we upgrade the craft. But I don’t just want to make way for merchants to come and clog up the towns with their wares.” She sighs wistfully. “I want to build a ship for myself and sail it further than anyone has been. Something new. Who knows what’s out there -” she props her chin in her hand, meeting Korra’s eyes, “what it could teach us?”

 

Korra looks perturbed, but then she nods thoughtfully. “I bet you could learn a lot just from us -” and she cuts the air with a wide arm, signifying all her underwater brethren. “Like, your boat technology stuff.”

 

She offers Asami some of her slippery kelp. It has an unappetizing gleam. “It’s good for you! For your skin.”

 

“For _you_ , maybe,” Asami laughs, swerving out of the way. Korra takes up the challenge, lunging and smearing the glaucous residue straight onto Asami’s skin from hers, palms moulding the curves of her collarbones.

 

Asami groans, wrenching her hands off, screwing her nose. “N- _no_ \- I’ll smell like fish!”

 

Korra’s intense, puzzled indignation is instant. “What’s wrong with that?”

 

-

 

The boats that have been vanishing - have been _vanishing._ So it’s a shock that’s difficult to parse when one of the salvage missions they send out actually discovers the wreck of a missing carrier that had disappeared about a month before. Asami listens to the report, rapt, and her flesh crawls. The vessel hadn’t sunk or foundered so much as been splintered to pieces and left on the seabed to rot. The damage patterns fit no force or creature they know, and the salvors come back feeling strange after-effects of dread.

 

-

 

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Korra says in Asami’s ear, frightening her into the rock pool she has been examining. She’s fortunate to land in a flat patch of sand, clouding the water and forcing several crabs to scuttle away. Korra gasps in worry, then audibly swallows a laugh, and grabs Asami by the collar, tucking her other arm under her ribs to pull her out onto the strand again.

 

“Are you hurt? I’m sorry,” she says earnestly, cupping the back of Asami’s neck. “I didn’t mean to catch you off guard.”

 

Asami reins her breath in, touching the print of Korra’s drenched arm on her waist automatically. Did _merfolk_ not… simply greet people?

 

“Who do you want me to meet?” she says, the heat creeping on her neck compounding that of the intensifying sunlight. Korra makes her turn around, another careful touch to her back that Asami could have done without.

 

Cautiously, out of the waves waddles a seal pup the colour of purest snow. Asami’s suddenly alert eyes seek Korra’s: she knows white seals exist, but this one - _luminesces_ \- and if she still believed the girl beside her could not be of this earth, she would say the same for this creature.

 

Korra shepherds the pup into her arms with her tail and waves Asami closer. “Her name is Naga,” she says softly, and Asami leans closer to hear, feeling knowing eyes on her face.

 

“And where did you find her?” She says urgently.

 

Korra continues in her hushed tone. “Asami, that’s the thing. I’ve always had her. I found her, I always knew I was meant to have her. But until yesterday she was ivory...” Korra’s voice scratches in passion - as she sifts a hand through the pure fur it gleams, shifting tinctures of pink and gold light. “And until yesterday, she didn’t do _this_.”

 

Asami raises her brow and stares long into Korra’s eyes. Her face is a mirror.

 

“I _think_ ,” Korra emphasises, unwilling to commit the thought to words prematurely, and on her that’s a sign of genuine wonder. “I think she’s meant to be my guide. To the spirit world.”

 

She breathes the last part, keeping Asami’s gaze. Paralysed with this near-evidence of her destiny mewling in her arms, Korra holds the moment still between them, barely blinking.  

 

Eyes as wide as worlds. As blue.

 

She smiles finally when Asami cups her cheek in celebration, palm against the curve of her jaw right where the morning sun makes it bronze.

 

-

 

That face, it fascinates her. She thinks of it even on all the days she doesn’t see her. Especially on those days.

 

Asami tries it with some of her makeup. She dabs the powder usually reserved for her eyelids on the planes of her face, her jaw, and brushes until the fine dust gleams as subtle as moonlight. But it’s a poor imitation: it catches too little of the light, but too frequently.

 

She swipes it off quickly and rushes out to the deck when the sound of a sudden rattled shout makes her drop the container in surprise. Outside she finds many of the labourers out early rumbling around the net that some of the hunters have hoisted off the beach. It’s a whale, a gray calf - not a rare sight at all these days, and by no means large enough to gather a small crowd. She asks what’s wrong and covers her mouth and nose when the men part for her to see: from head to tail the fresh kill is festering, the rusted harpoon protruding from the back washed in blood as black as tar.

 

-

 

“So have you ever been in love?” Korra asks, as if it’s another quirk of human girls.

 

Asami has swaddled herself in two shawls. It’s midnight, a delayed rendezvous; the only, but not paltry, light on the beach streaming from the crystal moon and the shoal of bright jellyfish Korra has coaxed ashore.

 

Asami laughs wryly to deflect: her cheeks feel how the phosphorescing creatures look. “Um... that’s a personal question. Wanna learn about some human manners?”

 

“Aren’t we friends?” She can hear Korra’s pout. In the relative dark, the thump and mass of her tail is heavier and more ominous, but whenever the moon catches her, her scales match it like a mirror.

 

The ocean too, always sounds wilder than it looks; but the sound draws Asami in, lulling her head onto her knees.

 

“Well, why do you ask?”

 

“Um… just curious.” Korra’s head is on the sand by her feet, facing the small stretch of illuminated water and watching the jellyfish pump around in it. There’s sleep in her voice. Asami wants to uncurl and pull her head into her lap, and wrap her bare silky skin up, in spite of the cold stitching her own limbs together, and in spite of the obvious redundancy of such a gesture.

 

“About what?”

 

“What it feels like.”

 

Asami hears her tail swish in the sand before she hums and continues. “All the stories _we_ have about humans, where they don’t just do something stupid or drown - somebody’s falling in love with them. Wanting to _be_ one. That always sounded so silly to me. But maybe it makes sense, if you really love someone. I mean, I guess they’re not as ugly as I thought.”

 

Asami graces her musing with a laugh, even as it opens a pit of spiraling thoughts that she has to tighten her gut to keep stemmed. She looks out beyond Korra and the jellyfish. The tide hangs back, licking the shore like a nervous animal, and all of Korra is dry on the beach, as she rarely is, in order not to miss Asami’s muted voice.

 

“Then have you ever thought about what it would be like? To be human?” Asami prods.

 

Korra grimaces. She’s considering Asami’s feet beside her, tapping her nail on the big toe like it’s some alien specimen. But then she lets her fingers wisp over them almost apologetically, and her voice is sheepish when she answers. “It’s too weird.” She laughs. “I’m sorry! They’re like deformed hands. But… okay, they’re kind of cute.”

 

Asami shakes her head, brimming with mirth. “I’d hope you would know by now that there’s more to human life than that.”

 

It strikes a chord in Korra; for a glimmer of a moment Asami thinks she’s going to sit up. “Right? There’s so much more… Like, the water is only half the world - we both only know one half of the world. And I just think… why do humans share our bodies and faces, but nothing else?”

 

In the dark Asami nods slowly. It’s a pertinent question. Her books have a lot to say, but little that doesn’t sound fanciful and rather self centered now that she has inklings of the reality of underwater life.

 

“It’s like our world and the Spirit World,” Korra continues. The equivalence is puzzling until she explains. “The spirits seem to care what’s happening here, and we need them to keep our world right. But we’re separated. It’s not right that we’ve lost contact.”

 

And it’s in the ride of her voice: if Korra has a wrong to right, the earth and sea will move for her.

 

-

 

It’s when Asami is nearing sleep that she first feels it, feathering her throat with her fingertips as gently as if one or the other weren’t her own; half-dreaming of a wreath of cool, slimy kisses around her neck.

 

She startles. She fingers the faint ridge on her throat and fumbles for the light; gropes for the hand mirror in her bedside drawer.

 

A thin, slanted welt scores her skin where the muscle of her shoulder slips behind her neck. It’s not a cut she remembers getting, but it could be any number of colleagues in a rush, slip-happy tools or sharp corners.

 

In the morning she gives herself a few minutes for her leg to come back to life. It tingles with the rediscovery of sensation, like every morning, and she has to make an effort to make nothing more of it, unlike every morning. There are provisions to help the council send for - their nets are coming up all but empty now - and she prays the boats they make ready will make it to the city.

 

-

 

A bright morning over several months since their first meeting, with the wind and sun fighting for dominance.

 

Asami lugs a tiny surf boat with her out of the bay, because Korra has promised to show her a favourite spot, a lagoon hidden a few miles up the coast. Korra swims alongside the craft, yelling up to Asami; insistent on carrying a conversation over the wild wind. Asami yells back at her to yell louder, until her futile shouts crackle into laughter; shakes her head at Korra until Korra executes a dazzling few leaps in the water designed to spray the disdain out of Asami. She swims deeper for a while, a fountain when she spins out of the water again, slinging her arms over the hull to beckon Asami.

 

“Follow me now.”

 

Korra leads her through a narrow pass between craggy rock barriers cracked like bark. As they enter, the water mellows from deep to baby blue, to a turquoise so clear that Asami is looking as if through a rippled glass at the white sand floor mere metres below. She glances around, feeling Korra’s eyes track her wonder. The lagoon, a crystal circle bounded by reefs under the water and a mossy islet archipelago above, is breathtaking.

 

“You’re lucky this is worth all this,” Asami says, a laugh catching in her throat, gesturing to her shirt and cropped pants still discoloured by wet splotches. She wipes her brow of sweat and seawater, sidestepping off the thwart down onto a table of flat pebbles and scumming water. “How did you find this place? It’s beautiful.” She finishes dragging the boat up by the stern onto the bank, and looks back to the water.

 

Korra smiles, tucking her chin on the perch of a smooth rock. “Exploring.” She’s floating backwards suddenly, swimming from the question. Exploring. Asami likes the image: Korra turning stones coast to coast, sounding with whales, meandering with rivers and meditating in underwater caves.

 

“What?” She says, laughter threatening her indignant pout.

 

“Nothing,” Asami laughs, dropping her gaze before she smiles up again. “Hey, I’d like to draw you one day, if it’s alright.”

 

Korra’s tail fans the still pool into a race of wild ripples, and she goes and drifts in the middle. Something catches her eye - she freezes, hands curled in a wring of her dark hair - and dives suddenly.

 

“Asami! So how well do you know your reef fish?” She emerges seconds later with a startled damselfish in her hand.

 

Asami sits forward, dangling her feet in the cool pool. The school Korra must have spied from her position flutters past under the water, converging and diverging in a wave of its own. “Pretty well, I like to think.” Asami’s mouth is thin, a sly challenge barely suppressed. “Are you going to test me?” She says, knowing the answer.

 

There’s no time wasted with Asami on board. Korra’s eyes bulge; she releases the fish and it streams back to the school in a quick weaving line. “So what’s that one?”

 

“Damselfish,” Asami says readily, blinking provocatively. “Are we starting easy?”

 

“Of course.” Korra nods appreciatively from the centre of the pulsating circle, the mossy rocks and flora of the lagoon curling in around the water. Her arm snatches behind her, droplets flying with the speed; and it returns with a vermilion fish, marked with black like the brand of a grill. Korra raises her eyebrow.

 

“Angelfish.”

 

She bites her lip. “What kind?”

 

“Flame angel!”

 

Korra chucks it back in the water, gently. “Yeah, Dad says I ate too many when I was young and now I’m _excitable_.” She shrugs, conceding to Asami with a charming grin. “You’re good. Fine.” Her eyes flit around before she dives again. Without her presence to soak it for the moment, the scenery regains Asami’s attention. The breeze dances in the weeds and Asami closes her eyes to feel its caress on her face. It stirs her hair and she raises a hand to it where it lies matted on her shoulders from the journey.

 

When Korra emerges with a tiny fish gupping in the bowl of her hands, Asami is untangling the windswept hair with her fingers. Korra lifts the bowl closer to Asami. “Bet I’ve got you now.”

 

She has. Asami sucks her front teeth in, peering into her hands as if scrying. The fish darts erratically, a pink-tipped arrow piercing the water over and over. Asami concentrates - her hand stills in her hair - but she doesn’t know what it is.

 

“I don’t know.”

 

The satisfaction on Korra’s face, the smug flash of her brows and the slide of her tongue across her lower lip, is a hit Asami’s pride can take. Asami shrugs, wincing when her fingers catch in a particularly stubborn knot of hair.

 

Korra says, “It’s a fairy wrasse. Aren’t they pretty? Never eaten one, actually.”

 

Asami reaches into the cavernous pocket of her pants to pull out a comb for her hair, and the fish is released and forgotten.

 

“I still got two out of three.” She teases out the last of her leverage with her knots, pulling the comb free and slicing back into the other side of her parting. Korra flicks her hand dismissively, and an idea springs into Asami’s mind.

 

To Korra’s too, evidently, because she sits up as her eyes lock on Asami’s hair. She bobs over to Asami’s rock, pulling the water out of her own mane as she comes.

 

“Want me to do yours?” Asami says - unnecessarily, because Korra is already hovering about her lap, waiting her turn. She’s a little far for Asami to reach, with her own legs in the way, so Asami gestures her head onto her lap instead. Korra is heavy and calm now. Asami cuts a parting with the comb and guides her head to face that side up. She sweeps through her damp hair.  

 

This activity is perfectly suited for the serene setting. With both their attention here, Korra in her grasp, the stillness falls suddenly.

 

Her hair is silky clean, messy and wet, threads knotted into small flowers by water. Asami detangles with quiet gusto, willing with her mind that the force be gentle; smoothing her scalp with a press of cool fingers when Korra twitches at the touch.

 

Presently, Asami huffs, a laugh to herself until it isn’t and Korra hums up in question.

 

“Oh. Do you... wanna hear my favourite story about how to deal with a bad winter?”

 

Korra impels her with a short thrust of her tail. It resumes its relaxed sway, sending tiny barely-cresting waves across the pool again. The _plip plip_ of the droplets from her raised elbow pull Asami with Korra, into her sleepy rhythm.

 

“So there’s this one tradition we have. When it’s a bad winter, of course it means that the spirits have snatched everything away in their anger. They take all the fish, all the animals, and they - get tangled in the hair of the spirit mermaid.”

 

Korra’s fins lap slower at the water - puzzlement, amusement - and she giggles the best she is willing to from her trance of comfort. “Okay...”

 

Asami brushes the strands of hair displaced by her laugh back over her temple. “Yes,” she says, following the curve of Korra’s ear with the comb. “So, they send down a man. A man, and he has to comb the mermaid’s hair, wash it, and set all the animals free.” She holds the ends of Korra’s no longer unkempt hair in a fist to pull the comb through them. Then she moves further along her scalp, the back of her head. “She lets them go. It calms her down and she’s not an angry mermaid anymore…”

 

“You are so ruining this moment, Asami,” Korra mumbles, shifting slightly, covering her mouth as if the upfront comment had slipped out unplanned.

 

Asami licks the tentative smile on her own lips. This moment. Scored by enough intimacy to be marked as such.

 

This moment. The soft, thin hairs that wisp over Korra’s neck - she flats her palm over the warm skin, knows it’s sensitive and combs it across slowly and puts her eyes to the task, too.

 

She stops. She holds the hitch in her breath in.

 

Her hand loosens around the comb, the other with its frozen fingers on the back of Korra’s neck; Korra nudging at air for her to continue.

 

Korra with two scar-like seams on the back of her neck, identical to Asami’s.

 

She shuffles again, abrupt despite the calm hanging like a drape over her body. “Hey! Tickles.”

 

Asami retracts, but it takes a moment for Korra’s words to reach her, with her heart in mouth, and the touch remains long enough to be lingering before she pulls away. So Korra wiggles a little, a vaguely, gently irate, “Asami! Gills tickle,” as Asami snatches her hand back.

 

“Sorry,” Asami says shortly, hoping that if touching - _gills_ (she breathes) - is a gross breach of personal space or something, Korra would tell her.

 

She picks the comb up with a trembling hand. Korra luxuriating in her lap is not any wiser. “I didn’t - I didn’t know you had them. Here.”

 

“Oh, they can be anywhere. But usually they’re somewhere around your neck, yeah.”

 

“Mm.” Asami draws circles with her toes in the water. “Hey, other side.” She helps Korra lift her head and attends to the final locks of hair.

 

-

 

It’s an early, misty morning at the pier. Asami tightens the ribbon around her neatly braided hair and waits with her chin in her hand, the hand mentally on the cowrie shell in her pocket, wondering if she should call for Korra when Korra had already promised the time of their meeting. She doesn’t have long; she needs to be back at the docks before the sun is fully up, or she won’t make it to the city in time. It’s a day’s journey, for a few days’ trip overall - she hopes so at least, if it’s to be a worthwhile consultation on their plan of action for the year, since these unseasonal storms and scarcities don’t seem to be letting up.

 

If Korra doesn’t hurry, she won’t see her for - a while. A severance whose prospect feels strange and oddly sad with the routine they have fallen into. Maybe even a setback, what with Korra’s deepening forays into the mystery of the spirits.

 

Wait, there she is. There’s a bulge and a swell in the water. Asami springs up at the sight, and then waits the final few seconds back in her expectant position as Korra swims right up and grabs the post of the pier.

 

“Sorry I’m late! I was looking for something,” she says. Her hand leaves the post and claps down on the last plank of timber, but her other arm is curled again her chest, sheltering a rudimentary canvas bag. “When are you leaving?”

 

“Soon.” Asami’s lips purse. “What do you have there?” She was going to ask _why did you want to see me?_ until she saw the sack and found a better way to put the whirlpool of feeling in her stomach to words. Really, there must be more to such a dizziness. Had she slept alright?

 

Korra ignores her for the moment. “Be safe, okay?” She glances down into her arm, and back up to Asami, to her face. From the bag, she pulls out another cowrie shell, striped like a surgeonfish. “This is… a token.” She holds it out to Asami.

 

She takes it. “Of what?”

 

“Show them, if you need to, if they need help believing.” Korra blinks entreatingly. “So that they know we’re here - and we’re working on answers.”

 

Asami’s mouth parts slightly in understanding. She nods. Who knows how she’ll explain the existence of _merpeople_ , but she figures she will have to. More and more of the townspeople are caving to the possibility of spirits, reaching back for answers, to what their forward-thinking minds might not long ago have dismissed as primitive conjecture - it’s funny what a crisis will do. Merpeople. Not much of stretch from there.

 

Korra has another token.

 

She pulls it out of the bag but keeps it clutched to her chest. Doesn’t let it go until Asami tentatively opens her hand for it.

 

“This is for you.” Korra drops it in her hand. The polished teeth of a seashell comb makes a slight dig into Asami’s palm on impact. It’s studded with glass and pearls like Korra’s crown. Asami gasps softly - it’s beautiful, and yes, a personal keepsake, _intensely_ so. Delicate and precious. She has to pull it inward in her clutch because the gift feels too private out in the open.

 

Which makes this feel suspiciously like a goodbye. Asami scrapes her toes against the soles of her boots.

 

“I think you’d put it to better use,” Korra says, suddenly shy. And just as Asami is about to ask, scrambling briefly from the faintness again, she elaborates. Maybe it’s the trepidation of the separation doing this to Asami’s body - which is a thought so shameless she’s embarrassed to have had it, and then Korra says -

 

“I’m going somewhere, too.”

 

Asami’s wayward thoughts settle in her stomach like ballast. Korra beckons her closer. Asami pulls the strap to adjust the satchel on her own shoulder so she can kneel forward, intent.

 

“I’m going to the spirit world.”

 

Asami lets the weight settle again.

 

“Well, I’m going to try. I need to see what I can find, what’s really going on here.”

 

Korra sighs. No sooner than Asami has collected her breath to reply, it’s knocked out of her as she surges and throws her arms around her shoulders. Asami gasps from the cold hand on her neck, before holding tight, tucking her own chin over Korra’s shoulder. She isn’t irritated for the surprise wetness this time, not ambivalent even; it’s a welcome, familiar sensation that she ought to imprint in her mind.

 

“I’m coming back soon, of course,” Korra says, her conviction a steady bridge over the gaping, inescapable uncertainty.

 

“We’ll have to report back as soon as possible. Whatever we learn. As soon as I get back,” Asami tells her, reluctant to release her. Her pragmatic tone is at odds with the shakiness of her body. “Thank you for this, for going. You’re an amazing friend.”

 

“I’m not doing this for you,” Korra laughs, latching onto the opportunity to leaven the mood.

 

Of course she isn’t: the devotion Korra demands of herself is to the whole undeserving world.

 

-

 

The _plip plip_ from the lime-stained faucet helps Asami’s thoughts cloud like the bathwater. It is hypnotic and she lets it take over her mind and body, neck aching from the wide bend against the back of the tub as she dozes.

 

Asami is lightheaded. Too lightheaded to have left with the company, though her state is improving somewhat with the hours of rest. Cold water should help with the giddiness, and it does help her mind anchor, but the bath makes her body swirl into a vaguely unpleasant mess with the water, rather than grounding it. She only groans awake over a long few minutes when the tingling pain arrives at her leg, very untimely today. She leapfrogs the remaining steps to alertness when it morphs into a subtle _scratching_ sensation, like blunt nails tickling her skin. Then pinpricks. She sits up and pulls a loose strand of her bun out of her dry mouth.

 

Her knees come out of the water.

 

Asami covers her mouth. She bites her cheek, hesitant to touch the filmy scales of her right thigh. They twinkle, wink at her. They open like red leaves; a bloodless recreated wound.

 

The scratches and the shooting stabs of pain keep her from fainting, and lead her to one thought only, one urgent need.

 

_Korra._

 

-

 

The loamy earth is soft and shapeless beneath her feet. A thousand tiny cramps in her leg, a thousand wayward shots of electricity, mean that at least those legs aren’t numb; she can stumble - stumbling however much - over the docklands, over the baby spring grass, over the shingle and the steps of stone all the way -

 

To the cove, where she falls forward on her hands. Deep breaths.

 

Deep breaths are useless. She’s about to scream when she remembers, grabbing the conch shell from the deep pocket of her dress. She flops down right on the shoreline, a bad and awkward landing, with it in a vice fist, her hair coming loose into the swirling wind. The sun is dipping into the horizon.

 

Heavens. _Korra_.

 

Her heartbeat is erratic and she succumbs to the feeling too familiar.

 

-

 

She must be delirious and hallucinating the image before her eyes. Korra is here out of nowhere, whipping the sea into a frenzy like the most violent of storms. The white glow of her eyes dizzies Asami even more, puts sunspots in her wet eyes. The sweep of her tail makes tides. Korra pushes ashore and the weight of her palm in the sand makes it subside.

 

Asami is torn between looking away and just _looking_ , away out of pain and drawn irresistibly by the overwhelming crash of confusion and awe.

 

Then, as suddenly as she had appeared from thin air, Korra is Korra again - the light in her eyes snuffed and a desperate breath knocked into her chest. She grasps Asami’s arm, hard enough for Asami to know that it’s for her own reassurance and not Asami’s. When she looks at Asami biting her tears back, her legs held conspicuously immobile, Korra is stricken but not - not surprised, unless Asami really has lost her grip.

 

“Are you alright?! I came as soon as I could!”

 

In a matter of minutes or hours, yes (she isn’t sure.)

 

She wants to ask if Korra’s endeavours have borne any fruit today, but all that the pain and panic will let her surface is, “What’s happening to me?”

 

Not that she doesn’t know.

 

Asami pulls her skirt back, wincing when it scrapes the raw skin on her leg, sliced by thin, filmy plates. Before their eyes, the fresh scales pierce out like teeth. It has taken her this long to see that it’s relatively bloodless; her blurry eyes found the red tint and her brain took it to the obvious conclusion. But only a few flecks seep into the fabric when Korra tears her skirt and wraps it snugly around the top of her legs.

 

“I - I think I can explain.”

 

Asami can barely externalise her nod of acknowledgment as she squeezes her eyes shut. The prickling sensation shackles her from the hip down - the  need not to aggravate the burn, whatever jolt of electricity is lurking at the turn of a millimetre - but she’s aware…

 

She’s becoming aware that more than her own desperate instinct is binding her legs. The realisation is the loss of the ground beneath her. Asami sobs, too terrified for the pain to writhe her; quashes the impulse to draw a fist up and stifle the cries barely contained behind her teeth, realising that no, one hand won’t hold her up now…

 

Thick tears course quickly from her face, and when they rush into her lap she hears _clinks_ , compounding her disorientation. Asami looks down - as Korra gasps, snatching a small pearl as it bounces off a scale.

 

“What -”

 

“Don’t worry, it isn’t - it happens. Come into the water,” Korra presses, and then softens. “Please. Here -” When Asami shifts - not _of_ her own will but against it - and her elbow threatens to buckle, Korra tightens her mouth in a stern sort of pout and takes her fully around the shoulders.

 

“I went to the Spirit World,” she says suddenly, as if deciding she should make good on her explanation already, even now. As if it’s imperative, for Asami’s sake. She massages all the burning skin under her fingers. “You summoned me, even from there!” It might have been something to laugh bashfully off any other time.

 

Korra pulls away for the moment and works fast, the water coming to Asami to make a rippling pool. The rivulets crisscross on the bumps of her changing skin: it could be mesmerising, to someone else.

 

Asami wouldn’t know. She whimpers. At least the cool water is some relief. Korra throws her arm back around her, pulling her in, and clasps the other shoulder with her hand. She presses her cheek to her shoulder and then her chin over it. Her hair smells like salt. “I made it, to the Spirit World and…”

 

“What did you find?” Asami says valiantly. The pregnant glance that follows shows her easily that the answers are many and that rallying them, choosing one, is difficult. And it’s not the question on the threshold of her mind anyway. So Asami narrows down.

 

“You… did this, right?”

 

Korra squeezes her tightly, again. This could be the best pain relief yet, the small part of Asami frenzied into sardonic detachment thinks.

 

She doesn’t hesitate to meet her eyes, however. Not Korra.

 

“The Spirit World... is _beautiful_ . And my magic there - is probably actually tenfold. Of course - it’s at home, right?” Korra says, and a look at her eyes says she’s _there_ again, not here. “But I never realised - I had no way to know, just how _deep_ its power was until I saw it there today. And it transformed everything I had worked it on. I don’t know, like being there triggered its full potential. I… used a lot of magic on you. Too much.” She’s seeing that magic revealed again, and she’s unsure what to make of it.

 

Until her eyes fall back on Asami. They sparkle in the fading light.

 

Asami gives her the barest nod of understanding, her throat constricting. And maybe Korra’s solid gaze is wavering now.

 

“You know, I couldn’t just let you die. I _couldn’t_.”

 

Every fibre of Korra is willing her to believe it. A few tears slip out, hurrying in shame, and the edge of Korra’s palm practically muscles them away. The sight aggravates Asami’s pain, or at least it feels that way; she sighs, trying not to look at her lower half still in turmoil, and sucks air through her teeth.

 

“But I’m sorry,” Korra whispers, taking her distress straight to heart, reduced to the essence of her not-quite-regret now.

 

“Not you.” Asami lets her head fall against the side of hers. “I promise.” Korra looks up again so their eyes can meet. In the brace of her arms, Asami can afford to free one of her own, and she lifts it and pries Korra’s hand off her shoulder to hold it. “You -” she takes a moment to bite against a new shot of fire in her - legs?

 

“You saved my life.”

 

She would be dead. She _should_ be dead. Instead she’s here because Korra found her disappearing, and replaced what had fled with part of herself to keep her on earth. How could she be resentful?

The sun is low and the orange light brings out the colour of her scales, which are emerging faster. Little red flowers sprouting, and pulling her skin apart in a hundred different places at once, splitting her short breath a hundred ways, and suddenly -

 

It helps to think of them as a gift, as all the Korra inside of her.

 

That, and she’s losing the energy even to hurt. The glow of the sun is harsh on her eyes. She focuses instead on it reflected in the pools around her, bright spilled watercolours. On the smooth shapes about, the rocks, rills and eroded shells. Tears and clinks interrupt her; she holds the knot of her stomach together.

 

When sailors who _loved_ the sea - whose love for the sea made them grey with longing (or maybe this seashell pink like Asami when she liaised with Korra) - died, they lived their next life not up in the heavens but in the depths as one of the merfolk. Asami had read this once, a whimsical piece of explanatory lore that had tested her patience more than her belief.

 

She has to wonder where it came from. Who had perhaps once died to become what, why and how.

 

“You know, that day, I felt you,” Korra says, releasing a deep breath, sounding like she can’t decide if her confession is a blessing or a curse. The tension in Asami’s spine is eased by the warm runnels Korra draws up her over her muscles, and she lets her support all her upper body now, collapsing into her. Korra continues, “When you came back to see me for the first time. You didn’t call me, but I knew where to go. So that's when I - suspected -” She cuts off, at the touch of Asami’s slumping cheek on her shoulder.

 

“I owe you my life,” Asami repeats. When Korra exhales her next breath, her air is different.

 

“I owe you mine.”

 

Asami winces. Korra takes it for the confusion which Asami, in the wake of another sneaky twinge of pain, had only intended as a secondary meaning.

 

“You set me on this path.” She pulls back, still holding Asami up with generous hands, but her face and shoulders are strong and straight. Her pupils are still ringed in faint silver; the markings on her skin still radiating. “If I hadn’t met you, I would never have done what I did today. And Asami,” she says, her voice rising. The excitement that her concern for Asami had overridden is back, and she looks like she can hardly believe that she forgot it for so long. “I was _right_. There’s so much I have to tell you.”

 

“What did you find?” Asami almost makes to sit up, until the pain twangs her back.

 

“I was right, not just about our magic originating in the Spirit World.” More than light glows in her eyes. She brings her voice and gaze lower, closer to Asami again, so she won’t have to strain to meet her. “About humans and merfolk,” she continues cryptically. She draws water over Asami’s - tail - like she’s pulling a cord, creating a lullaby from the continuous burble. The remainder of the disappearing light, all of it seems to converge in her face, which outglows the sunset when she looks back to Asami. “We are connected. We were _human._ ”

 

Asami’s intake of breath is instantaneous. She waits for an explanation, suddenly still, all the desire to fidget from her trap of sorts gone.

 

“I should be clearer. The mer-tribes - we used to be human.” Korra touches Asami’s tail, at once absent and careful. (Asami braces herself for pain and realises her scales have some sensation, but nowhere near as much as skin.) “Back when there was no barrier between the worlds, the spirits chose us as peacekeepers between them and the humans, and endowed us with magic - made us _part_ spirit. Part human, part spirit.”

 

“The magic transformed us,” she gestures down, “These bodies, they’re the result of that chemistry. They bind it to us and help us live undersea, where those few pockets between the worlds still exist. But when when I was there -” She laughs out of incredulity.

 

“In the Spirit World, the magic is outside of us. It doesn’t have to be contained. That’s part of why it’s stronger, why my going there made it do this…” With a finger, Korra moves water in a tiny arc over one after another of Asami’s scales, washing them individually. “In this world it was practically dormant in comparison. It’s so much more _awake_ there, outside of my body - it’s free.” Her markings flare with light briefly - Asami knows somehow, how wild and vibrant Korra’s magic was untethered and amplified. “And so that’s why the part of it in you... kinda got racked up so fast.”

 

Asami’s legs are gone now. She misses them desperately. She does have an extravagant looking fin perhaps a foot or two below where her feet had been. But it doesn’t seem anything more than ornamental, and she wouldn’t know how to move it.

 

Korra sighs, but this time it’s to relieve her excitement. “But with that magic, that spirit part on the outside… Well, I was human in the Spirit World.” She makes sure to have Asami’s gaze as she says the words. “I had legs.”

 

Asami almost sits up in shock. Korra’s arms anchor her. “You - _how was it?_ ”

 

Korra considers for longer than she would have expected. “Mm, well. Scary.”

 

Who’d have thought? Asami’s exhale is inflected with laughter; she wriggles her fingers free and lifts them to give Korra’s cheek a sympathetic brush. Korra laughs gently.

 

“Did - could you walk?”

 

“Of course.” She’s almost affronted. “It was strange at first. I had trouble going straight. Unlocking the knees. I... did some stretches,” she says thoughtfully. “It was tempting to just move with my mind - you can do that there - but they told me I should get used to walking if I’m going to come to them more often.”

 

So. That means Korra plans to be their ambassador to the spirits. Asami does sit up this time. Slack with memory, Korra lets her. Asami nudges her, and she turns serious.

 

“They _are_ angry. You were right about everything. No one in this world has made contact with them for centuries - we’ve forgotten how. They think that you - that we don’t care.” Korra’s voice is solemn. “Humans have been reaping an _alarming_ amount from the world. It’s out of balance. And we haven’t been doing the job of mediating either. That dream you had, no doubt it was a premonition.” Her head flops onto Asami’s shoulder. “But they’ll listen now. They have someone to talk to, and they know I cared enough to seek them out.”

 

The enormity of what Korra has achieved today hits Asami like a tidal wave. She knows it, too; she speaks of it like her destiny.

 

Again, it takes the edge off Asami’s own predicament, which is small in this grand scheme. “Korra, I’m pretty sure _at least_ this entire town is safe because of you.”

 

“I told you, you set me on this path.” She laughs. “Not sure I realised I _care_ about humans before I met you. And now I know that - well, technically I _am_ one.” She sighs, clearly still a little unsure what to make of the fact.

 

It’s dark, colder - Korra wraps her arms around her anew. “Things have to change fast, you know.” She finds her hand in her lap. “I know you know.”

 

Asami’s still unprepared to move, feeling more naked than in a while with the growing chill. With the vast quandary of what to do when she is prepared to move. She feels lost and little on the beach, blown here by a gale. Then a warm blanket of water is pulled up to her chest. From her perch in her shoulder Korra reaches up to kiss Asami’s temple. “It’s going to be alright.”

 

This predicament with the spirits, she means. But it helps Asami to take it for more than that.

 

Soon rain is clattering on the rocks. A bubble of Korra’s making keeps them sheltered. The racket keeps her thoughts at bay and before she knows it, Asami, exhausted, is falling asleep to the sound.

 

-

 

When she awakens, the sky and sea are clear and blue once more. Korra is nowhere to be found. Asami’s shirt (formerly dress) is crisp, hair dry; her tail is submerged in water, where it will feel like less of a dead weight.

 

The manoeuvre up from her prone position is painless. Her transformation is complete. The sun on her body is a pleasure beyond compare. Korra has left her to sleep on the shoreline - the very line, such that the waves will roll only to her waist. The longest of them are creeping up to her ribs now, which means Korra will probably appear soon just to help her move onto drier land.

 

Asami links her hands and lays them flat over her belly, enjoying the sea scent and sunshine.

 

When she finally hears Korra’s voice, it’s reaching her from an unexpected distance. Asami’s eyes flutter open.

 

“Are you awake? Come into the water!”

 

Asami pushes herself up on her palms. Korra’s deep in the shallows, just her eyes above the water.

 

“Come into the water,” she repeats, head surfacing to reveal her smile. “Just for this morning, okay?”

 

Tentatively, Asami wiggles the end of her tail. Then she discards her shirt.

 

-

 

“Just for the morning?” She lets Korra pull her further down by the wrists. The sudden interruption of water in her mouth, in her throat, doesn’t hinder her voice one bit.

 

She’s momentarily distracted by the weightlessness of her tail, the speed, the efficiency. The utterly minimal amount of breath she loses, concentration she uses, to follow Korra several heavy yards into the ocean. Asami curls her tail like a ribbon, enchanted by its agility - and by the colour of her undulating fins up close - like wine glimmering from a decanter.

 

The sunlight cracks the foamless water above, splitting it into shards of smalt glass. They hit the crevices of her tail and send it shimmering.

 

Korra smiles dreamily. “Are you rested?” She waits for Asami’s eventual nod, once she’s pulled her eyes off her tail. “So I went back to the Spirit World, around sunrise. I wanted to see if I could make a deal.”

 

“Oh…?” She has Asami’s full attention now. Asami pulls her wrist from Korra’s grip so she can take her hands properly. It feels like they’re posed to dance.

 

“I told them what happened. The spirits can’t turn you back. And even if they could, you would die, of course.”

 

They know this. Asami blinks, tempted to shrug. In a matter of life and death, life had meant _this_ and to reject it would be a rejection of all Korra has done for her that would break both their hearts.

 

“I told them -” Korra’s head cocks, fighting a smile both sly and mildly abashed (and for the first time, Asami’s stomach feels as weightless as the rest of her.) A shoal of fish materialises near them and she pulls her by the hands to evade it, laughing. “...Uh, I told them that - I might be their link to this world... But you are mine to the _actual_ humans. So we need you up there. In the best interests of the Spirit World.”

 

Not even the anticipation this produces, enough to make her tremble, can prevent Asami’s laughter at Korra’s ingenuity.

 

“Yes, you’re _welcome_ ,” Korra giggles. But Asami is quiet with gravity as soon as the laugh is out. And only as she continues does Asami realise Korra’s _buzzing_ to tell. “Tomorrow morning! You can go back. And the morning after, and so on. You just have to return here by sunset.” She sweeps her gaze over Asami’s long tail, “that’s when you’ll turn again.”

 

Asami is breathless. Down here it just feels like her gills have been sealed. She throws her arms around Korra, feeling her hair stream in the current behind her with the force of her embrace. A full embrace, for the first time; Korra aligned with her head to tail. Holding her close however, wherever she can. Blindly, Asami coils herself around Korra, and Korra’s lissom tail wraps back, so that even when Asami takes her hands from her back to cup her face, they’re wound in a tight embrace.

 

Korra clears her throat before Asami finds any words. “So… I wanted to spend this one morning down here with you.” She nods earnestly, the movement somewhat restricted by Asami’s hands. Her own remain around Asami’s waist, where the scales are sparse and close to the skin. She simply gazes for a moment before swallowing and smiling. “Hey, now that I know it’s not gonna be a sore point...” She tilts her head. “You look even more beautiful like this.” She nudges her tail against Asami’s, their closeness conspicuous.

 

Asami can swear she’s glowing again. She slides her thumbs in an arc along the faint shimmer on her cheekbones, in slow silence. A return of the compliment would not cut it. It never did. “You have to take me to the Spirit World,” she says, bowing forward so her forehead meets Korra’s. “I gotta see your human form before I can judge.”

 

Korra snorts, shaking her head and dislodging Asami’s where it had been pressed against hers. Asami’s gaze drops to Korra’s neck and her breath catches after a brief moment of recognition.

 

She hadn’t even noticed, so enraptured has she been by Korra’s face. Asami raises her fingers to the short string of pearls, tongue thick between her teeth.

 

A couple near-perfect spheres, several quite shapeless, one still a teardrop.

 

“Oh. I, um, I had some time after dawn, when I went home to tell everyone about…”

 

She trails off when she sees the new tears gathering in Asami’s eyes. Korra clasps her hand over Asami’s as it hovers at her necklace.

 

Asami isn’t sure if she kisses her first. It’s not a distinction that matters the moment their mouths meet. Her lips are cooler than the water. Korra smells salty and, yes, fishy; and after a night in her arms she even smells a little of the perfume Asami must have been sweating out.

 

And whatever else there is, the salt on her tongue, the fine sand still hiding in her hair, Asami is desperate to seek it out. Korra kisses her without inhibition, not touching to soothe any longer.

 

She could kiss her forever, Asami thinks. Really. Without the need to breathe air… The thought leads her roving fingers to the spot on Korra’s neck, where they ghost over her gills.

 

Korra tries not to splutter against her, breaking into a smile and a sweet laugh. “Stop it, that tickles,” she murmurs (oops, Asami had forgotten), bumping her nose against hers. Asami kisses her ardently in apology, but then it’s long served its point and Korra won’t let go.

 

“I love you,” Asami whispers, when she manages to pull back. It’s the least she can do. It only spurs another tide of kisses from Korra once she’s made her fervent rebuttal, quite confident as usual.

 

“But I love you more.”

 

And Asami can believe that Korra believes that - has every reason to, her very life not the least.

 

Tomorrow her work began, to help Korra rebalance their world. Today, Asami wants to know every marvel down here that Korra can show her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Mix](http://guileheroine.tumblr.com/post/180457023943/a-korrasami-mermaid-au-mix-to-go-with-the-blue) and lovely [art](https://pichikui.tumblr.com/post/180453319494/korrasami-mermaid-au-sketch-for-guileheroines)


	2. The Sea Comes Over Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few additonal bits written for Korrasami Month 2019 since it had a nice overlap with MerMay c:
> 
> Titled with the prompt.

 

_**Turtleduck** _

 

From the idyllic lagoon to the Spirit World and wonders beyond, Korra has brought her to countless corners of multiple worlds. **  
**

 

It’s Asami’s turn to show  _her_ someplace new. Something closer to home.

 

So seemingly mundane, in fact, that it’s taken her this long for the idea to even occur.

 

After leaving her rowboat moored in the firth, Asami walks on the riverbank. Korra swims upstream alongside her, gliding happily on the narrow span of the stream, fingers outstretched to skim the low banks. Being but a tributary of the great river around which the inner districts of the town had grown, this stream cuts through marshy surroundings still wild, green and silent save the sounds of animals. They come to where a lake branches off beside the river, the remnant of a cut off meander, with only silted earth and the thin rills cutting through it still connecting it to the channel. Asami gestures for Korra to come and look beyond the willow fronds that obscure most of the lake from view.

 

For herself, she settles on the edge of the pool, a palm to the ground first to check if it’s damp. “Look,” Asami says again, as Korra props up onto the bank beside her. Then Korra draws in a breath.

 

“They’re so -  _cute!_ ”

 

Asami glows as Korra’s eyes dart amongst the turtleducks paddling gently over the glassy water. A gentle swell of pride warms her when Korra’s tail flicks in excitement, sending a few heavy droplets her away. She laughs as they seep quickly into her sweater. Korra’s attention settles, eventually, on the short train of ducklings closest to the bank. As she tentatively reaches out to engage them, Asami sits back in contentment.

 

“ _Much_ nicer than your eel swans, no offense,” she says, leaning on her hand, head falling on her shoulder as her gaze on Korra turns tender and teasing. Last week, Korra had led an eel swan to Asami because she thought its electric properties would intrigue her, and the swan had clearly found it apt to try and give her a direct demonstration. Turtleducks, blessedly, are much more amenable. Their shells shine in the willow-dappled sun. “I haven’t seen too many of these in the wild, actually. I think they fare better in garden ponds, to be honest.”

 

“They’re quiet,” Korra agrees softly, pulling a single finger over the soft, fuzzy crown of one duckling. “I’ve - never seen one before.”

 

“Well, I was hoping you’d say that.” Asami smiles, watching the baby turtleduck nuzzle into Korra’s fingers. A couple more crowd around her stroking hand.

 

Korra blinks away from them for just a moment to grin back at her.

 

_**A Drunken Night** _

 

Asami had  _no_  idea how this might affect Korra. 

 

“Well, what do you drink?” She had asked offhand when she came to know that there was no such thing as an alcoholic beverage in any underwater realm that Korra knew of, on that still evening that Asami had first shared some tea with her.

 

“Water.” Korra had given her a look just short of perplexed.

 

“What else?” Asami closed her fingers around her cup, a glimmer of amusement bubbling in her.

 

“Um. Berry water, seaweed water, fennel water…”

 

“So you only drink water?”

 

Korra’s eyes had narrowed. “ _You_  just brought me leaf water.”

 

Well, that could hardly be argued. Asami had conceded it with a shrug and then - wondering if she would come to regret it - she explained how scarcely any of the townsfolk went the week without a stiff drink. Most of her workmates couldn’t call it an evening without liquor to cap off the toilsome day.

 

The question of regret remained to be answered. She watched Korra regard the bottle she’d eagerly snatched from her now with a sneaky sort of anticipation.

 

She sniffed delicately, and then blinked as though her eyes stung. “Is this the strong stuff?”

 

“It… it is.” Asami coughed to hide a laugh - both tickled at Korra’s suspicious intrigue and a little sheepish. She had no desire to hurt Korra, but she did have a burning curiosity. And, well, the easiest way to discover what kind of effect this foreign substance might have on an altogether fantastic creature was to provide her with a - significant - dosage. Maybe this was the scientist in Asami.

 

Nonetheless, Asami was reluctant to drink until Korra did.

 

And when Korra did, she  _did._

 

“Wait - !” Asami winced, gasped, and finally shook her head and laughed - Korra downed half the bottle of brandy in one courageous chug.

 

“ _Whew!_ ”

 

She shook her whole body and tail, eyes shuttering so profusely that amid Asami’s somewhat apprehensive chuckle she was moved to lay a hand on Korra to steady her.

 

“You okay?”

 

“Wow,” she breathed. “ _goodness_ , wow -” she burped, inducing a little spot of clarity for her to exclaim, “Asami, drink!” And then, “Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow,” in a thick, speedy chatter as she flung her arms on the pier for balance, laughter on a cloud. It would be a long night for Asami, but a memorable one. The light of Korra’s markings shimmered and then seemed to flicker and putter as she giggled. Soon her tail fins were skimming the water with an erratic and sinuous life of their own.

 

Asami took the other half of the bottle and splashed into the shallow water beside her.

 

_**Scars** _

 

There hadn’t been a trace left on her thigh when Korra first healed the ghastly wound. There was no evidence of her painful transformation now, so much direr thought it had felt, so extraordinary. Nothing from her waist down to her toes - Asami scrutinised and rolled and tested skin and joint and muscle with the utmost care the first day she had awoken with her old body again. Scarcely heeding the cold of the stone floor as she sat stretched across it with only her bath robe and some medicinal lotion. But ever since she got her legs back, even the momentary morning numbness was gone. **  
**

 

Yet she felt her skin peel away when she pulled a pair of close trousers over her legs; her tendons tear when she bent too low at the knees to examine some handiwork. If she napped between projects, she awoke with no legs at all again, even when their shape was clear under the blanket before her. The sight of beading blood from the scrape or nick of one of her work tools shot much grislier images through her mind, until Asami had to sit down and clear them away with focused breaths.

 

Sharp and sudden sensations, never lingering long but paralysing all the same, whenever they struck with no warning.

 

There were other new sensations. Pleasant sensations, draped delicately, deliberately over the unpleasant ones, designed to wear away at them. Korra tied anklets studded with tiny raw gems she had scavenged around Asami’s legs - kissed them first. Kissed all the spots where Asami said the phantom pain resurfaced, after listening with intent and pitiful eyes. Resurfaced with a stoppered bottle of an infused oily substance glimmering with whatever magic, and massaged Asami’s legs absently with it while they talked. Made them tingle with it, made them alive and healthy. Let them lock around her head, bare on the quiet pier, but warm, safe, and  _immutably_ real.


End file.
